[banging of a hammer] [quiet screeching of moving furniture] [banging of a hammer] [an earth-shaking crash somewhere outside] [monstrous sounds] [*whack*] That's not good... "Darkwood" is a game I've gotten a few hundred requests to do a video on. Most of these came from people saying: "if you liked "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.", you'll like this". From a mechanic perspective (and a perspective perspective), these are pretty clearly different games, but after about a half an hour of playing I understood: there are a lot of similarities, but I think that "Darkwood" executes a lot of things better than "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." I'll come back to that later. For now I need to take it from the top. Well, the first loading screen in the game says that I'm in for a hard time. Seeing that giant tree in the menu and hearing this music made me believe them. The intro cutscene is also pretty abstract. You learn that a plague is ravaging the land, everyone is cut off by the forest and you're pretty sure they want you dead. "We are all doomed". This is definitely an Eastern European game. And just like that it starts, and I'm already thrown off in the first few seconds of gameplay. Compared to other top-down games I've played, you have really slow, clunky movement. Your vision is also limited to a small cone. You learn that you're a doctor by exploring around the house. However, there's some warning signs you might not be doing so well. You go out to look for fuel – and that's when I noticed that there's been no music this whole time. You're just living the life of some Polish doctor. A pretty normal one. [a thud and a dog's dying whine] I didn't realize just how much that drawn me and until I went looking for fuel. My view is limited, so I can't see into the trees around me. This was the exact point that the music crept in. [subtle, barely distinguishable ambience] [crows taking off with cawing and flapping of wings]
[subtle, barely distinguishable ambience] Now I was really getting curious. The farther I went down the path – the more the limited field of view made sense. You don't get to see the hellscape all at once – just little pieces of it. At this point, I felt like Curious George. As if on cue, the man in the yellow hat appeared right in this field. He's an outsider. The doctor finds a key in his possession, and believes that he has the way out of the forest. He decides to ask the man about it when he wakes up. [thudding punches and creaking of the chair] You then switch characters, and now you're playing as the stranger. It's a really sudden shift, and then things can only stranger from there... [*click*] I'm sold on this. The prologue comes to an end and then the real "Darkwood" begins. And, boy, is it gonna take you for a ride... Let's get back to the usual groove and start with the graphics. "Darkwood" is primarily a 2D game, but there are some 3D elements here and there. For example, the base of these trees are 2D, but the trunks are 3D and extend up into the sky. It's hard to tell at times, which is the ideal. The vision system and the lighting is really pretty to look at. The fact you can tell the time of day by just looking around is a testament to that. It looks great. Especially when going through areas you can KIND OF see through. Interestingly, "Darkwood" doesn't highlight objects. If something is closer, it's sharper, and it blurs with distance. I didn't like it at first, but after a few minutes, I got used to it. I can't put into words why, but the blur looks natural. If it was bad It would look more like this. The overall art style of the game has very drab colors, which makes sense for the tone and setting. It also helps to make brighter colors, like blood, really pop up when they do show. It reminds me of some older movies. There's probably a genre name for the more supernatural elements of the art style, but I don't know it. I'll make an attempt though. Imagine Gieger, but he's a little bit less Swiss and, instead of his art being biomechanical, it's... bioarboribus? Yeah, I'm just gonna use that. Be sure to impress your local coffee shop with this word I made up. Just don't try it on any Spelling Bee champions. Anyways, look at this monstrosity. Now, that thing is bioarboribus. "Darkwood" has a lot of bizarre imagery in it. Where a lot of games will front-load this stuff, it actually paces it out really well. You start to see more and more disturbing things the farther you get in the game. No section felt tacked on. It was upping the ante more and more to the very end. There were a few cliches at points, but some of this imagery is not leaving me for a while. Maybe, never. So how do you play this game? "Darkwood" is broken up into two main stages: the day and the night cycles. Right after the prologue, you wake up in a house. There's a lit oven prepared for you, but this isn't an ordinary oven. It emits a substance that protects you during the night. Unlike most survival games, you don't need to worry about hunger or thirst. Despite this, you can still cook with the oven. It's not... exactly explained what "cooking" is. Gameplay-wise, it means breaking down mushrooms, animal meat and other materials into some sort of essence. So you go around picking mushrooms and slaying animals to fill up your syringe. When it's full, you get a skill. In most cases, you also have to pick a detriment. Now I can see farther, but nights will be more difficult. It's an optional system, but the benefits are hard to ignore. No matter what, you need the oven. The oven makes the hideout the safest place on the map. By "safest" I mean "it's the one place where that thing won't eat you". There are lots of open doorways and windows that can be broken into and need repairing. You're gonna need materials to do that. There are also generators that need gasoline. They need to be kept filled if you want any light. But the wood cutting saws also need fuel. They turn raw wood into boards, and you need boards and nails to shore up your defenses. You can slide furniture around to somewhat block or slow down entryways, but that will only go so far. You can’t survive by just hiding. During the day, you need to be an exploring machine. You have a very limited inventory starting off. You might find a supply cache, but have to take a few trips to bring it all back. That’s not a stroll in the park – this is a cursed, mutated Polish forest. That’s almost as dangerous as a normal Finnish forest. There is no telling what you’re gonna run into, and there are some extra elements that make this even more challenging. You do have a map, but it only tells you where you are if you’re near a landmark. These can be really far away from each other. The maps and the locations in them are also randomized. They’ll all have the same landmark or important locations, but shuffled around. Less important areas, like logging sites or mushroom fields will be COMPLETELY randomized. So the Darkwood is never the same on multiple playthroughs. So, if you wander and don’t find a landmark, you’ll get lost. You gotta be paying attention. If you’re cautious, you can avoid fights during the day, but the night is coming. You can’t avoid conflict, when conflict is breaking down your window. Survival means a whole lot of scavenging, but there’s gonna be fights no matter what. So now is a good time to get into the combat system. You have health and stamina. Health only regenerates with items. Stamina is drained by dodging, using weapons or running. It will recharge, but only after a delay – even longer if you got it to zero. There are two melee attacks to choose from: a slow windup that uses a little bit of stamina, or a quick jab that uses a lot of stamina. There’s also a dodge that jumps the character back and uses a tiny amount of stamina, but can build up if you keep using it. Combat is quick and brutal and easy to die if you’re out of position. There’s the option to craft or upgrade weapons to help even the odds. Easy-to-make weapons do little damage and break fairly quickly. The more rare weapons are harder to make and harder to maintain. New weapons can only be created and maintained from the hideout workbench. This makes durability a big deal. Sure, you can make a new weapon, but what if you can’t maintain it? Luckily, to keep it from being too RNG-based, there’s a trading system. Some characters in the world can be traded with, but after every night, one will show up at your house. There’s no money – you just build reputation with each trader. It’s not a personal standing, like actual reputation. Think of it more as like favors. Like: "Yeah, this trade is a bad deal, but I gave you good stuff the other day, right?" "Yeah, we have an agreement." Items that are of no worth to you might be valuable to a trader. This all circles back to how central scavenging is. Find stuff to upgrade your workbench to make more stuff. Upgrade your inventory slots so you can hold more stuff. Being the most shrewd kleptomaniac is key to survival. [*whack*] Sounds like Snoopy is back from his walk… Hey, look what I bought at Wolf Man Target! "Ow, my shoulder!" Scavenging can get tedious. Especially if you find a good loot site and have to take multiple trips back and forth. Thankfully, moving from hideout to hideout is less of a hassle. The local cyclist drunk can help you out with that. And while it can be tedious at times, at the very least, all the stuff you’re collecting is useful. I don’t mind it as much when it’s purposeful, rather than just a time-killer. What’s ironic is that exploring for loot is really fun. It’s when you find TOO MUCH that it becomes tedious, because then you need to haul it all back home. Wandering around is still valid even without a shopping list. You need to fill out those map landmarks. No matter your reason for checking something out, “Darkwood” is “high risk – high reward”. Dangerous areas have better stuff, but it might cost you your life to get in there. On Normal, you drop half of your items when you die. On harder difficulties, you still drop your items, but, if you lose all of your lives, it’s game over. My first playthrough took nearly 20 hours, so I wouldn’t recommend starting on Hard if you’re new. Whether it’s taking a quest or something as mundane as getting gas – everything feels risky. And this never went away. For example, getting a gun usually kills off all tension in these games. Not in “Darkwood”. You have a cone of fire that slowly closes in when you aim. You need to wait for enemies to get closer, because you don’t wanna waste ammo. Because you can’t craft more of it – you can only find it or buy it off of traders. So guns aren’t a final solution here. The night brings all these elements together. You can’t predict the night. Yeah, cool – weird mushrooms growing on the floor… [quiet creaking] Uh oh… Things get very supernatural at sundown. It’s hard to plan a defense against something that you don’t understand. It completely plays on fears of the unknown. You can see furniture and objects outside of your vision moving around, but you don’t know what’s moving them. Something just came in, and I don’t know what… This is a tense game of holding out, and the sound design alone is incredibly unnerving. [otherworldly sounds are coming from beyond the walls] [at times, they sound almost like murmurs and whispers, but are muffled and unintelligible] [loud creak] [ghastly humming] [*whack*] [monstrous snarls] [*whack*] No game has ever given me the feeling of a desperate holdout like “Darkwood” has. Sure, the first few nights might be quiet, but that changes dramatically. [loud shriek] [monstrous snarls] [malevolent laughter] Even outside of nights, the sound and visual presentation is great. There’s this one part where a man slamming his head into a table gets incorporated into the music. [*thud*] [*thud*] [*thud*] [*thud*] [*thud*] [with every thud, the tune builds up, like rising anger] The developers advertised it as a horror game with no intentional jump-scares, and they succeeded. If you’re into horror games, but hate cheap startles – this is for you. When the loading screen said it wouldn’t lead you by the hand, that also meant it wouldn’t treat you childishly. There’s no scene where a big silly thing pops up in front of the screen and makes a lot of noise. ♂ "G'A-A-AH!!" ♂
There’s no scene where a big silly thing pops up in front of the screen and makes a lot of noise. It’s a satisfying horror game, and a survival game. That makes the story the last thing to talk about. Without spoilers, it’s a bit like a dark fairytale. Most characters have titles instead of names: The Wolf Man, The Chicken Lady, The Bike Man. These are names you hear in folk tales. The setting itself is also hard to date. It seemed somewhat recent, but hard to place. It wasn’t until I found a magazine, then the game said it took place in 1987. I was decades off. Regardless, you are the central figure to the story, and the world will change, depending on your actions. “Darkwood” doesn't always say “hey, you did this” – it’s up to you to see the changes and figure out why they happened. The plot itself is kind of all over. There were points where I didn’t know how to progress the plot, and that might have been intentional. In practice, it can mean a lot of walking around, not knowing exactly what you’re doing anymore. There are typically multiple ways to accomplish your objectives, and quests and events can be related to each other in ways you might not see at first. Combined with that, there are David Lynch dream sequences that affect the world also. It’s very abstract. There’s a lot going on, and you can get lost easily. The benefit is – when the game is all done, things make sense. There’s still a lot of room for interpretation and a lot of backstory clues to put together. I could make an hour-long video on what I think the story means, and honestly, I don’t think I’d get bored with it, because there’s just so much to dig through. I AM going to talk about the ending. The very end. So, if you’re planning on playing “Darkwood”, and you don’t want spoilers, go to here: All good? Okay, this might be anticlimactic... Through whatever mean you chose, you escape the Darkwood. It’s the first time in the whole game you’re surrounded by nothing but fields. It’s a relief. You make it to the local town, chat with your neighbors and return to your apartment. After the long ordeal, you take a nice long rest, and the epilogue describes what happened to all the characters. It’s fitting, It’s fitting, moody It’s fitting, moody AND A LIE! Welcome to the fraud ending of your fraud life. I got the true ending the first time I played it, and mostly by accident. The idea of a weird zone and other elements reminded me of “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” the whole game, so I was kind of expecting a false ending, but this part right here was a giveaway. The Stranger’s been mute the whole game. Other characters and the mirror implied that he’s kind of monstrous and transformed. That’s not something a nice lady says “Good day” to. You have to search a mailbox and go out of your way into the basement. I was just an idiot and figured, since my mailbox was there, I must live downstairs. I was so used to exploring everything, that I checked off all the conditions and noticed something off in my room: there are roots growing underneath all the furniture. Polish apartments don’t get THIS bad. So, ripping off all the flooring reveals the hole under your bed, and if you go in that, you realize you’ve been dreaming the whole time. Well, not the whole time – at least past the Chapter 2. I mean, it’s very possible the the whole story is layers of dreams, but that’s a story for another day. I’ve done one of those already. I’m sure this part is in the real world. And what a world it is… It’s thousands of sleeping and decaying bodies, all around a strange being. This thing is what corrupted the forest. It lures people in through dreams and trances, where they fall asleep around it, die and fertilize it. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. If you resist its charms, you can find one of your comrades curled up. He was mentioned very briefly in a note talking about running off with a flamethrower. Well, he still has it, and he’s more than happy to share. It leads up to a disturbing scene where you torch the being and thousands of people there. It’s gruesome, and the fire spreads so wildly that there’s no escape for you – you perish in the flames. So, this time the epilogue talks about who survived the fire. It’s a satisfying ending, and it is similar to “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.”: there is an intelligence that gives you a false ending, but you can discover it and choose to go with it, or destroy it. However, where “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” gave you all the answers, “Darkwood” leads to more questions. Why do your dreams affect the real world? Why do some people radically transform, while others just go crazy? What exactly IS the being? How does it work? Why is it doing this? Honestly, I don’t think these questions matter that much. Yeah, you could have a sequel where you learn that the being was created by the… I don’t know… arboribic plague or something by the military. Have lists of weird criteria to explain how the mutations work and all that, but you don’t need it. The being is an unknowable thing with unknown power that I don’t understand, and I like it that way. When it comes to mystical weird things like this, I think that picking it apart just kind of ruins the magic of it. Like I said before, this is like a dark fairytale. It doesn’t really require an explanation. A long time ago, there was a beautiful forest. Then, one day, something evil came through the forest, and it began to change. As the woods changed, so did the people inside of it. They defended themselves with magic. Magic Kalashnikovs. [flipping pages]
Is that really it? There’s no more than that? My point is: you could pick apart the events and characters, but not the reason everything’s happening. That doesn’t need an explanation. Despite some annoyances, like the slow drag speed of small objects and some occasional translation errors, “Darkwood” is very well worth your time. It has an interesting premise with tense gameplay and great atmosphere. There’s lots of randomization and decisions that encourage multiple playthroughs. For $15 it’s pretty much a steal, for what you get out of it. It can be tedious at points, and if you hate inventory management, you probably won’t like it. I still think the positives FAR outweigh the negatives, because I love this game. Thanks for watching! Also, an extra thanks if you ever recommended me “Darkwood”. I don’t think I would have played it otherwise. Tune in next time for when I finally finish up the “Dead Space” series! That’s gonna make “Darkwood” feel pleasant. [monstrous screech] [more screeching] ISAAC: “No…” ISAAC: “NO!” MANDALORE: "This is so over the top…" [Shammy getting a chucklewheez]
MANDALORE: "This is so over the top…" [Shammy getting a chucklewheez]
ISAAC: “You find somebody else for your suicide mission!”
His STALKER comparisons make sense. A lone wanderer who is a bit kleptomanic, fighting unknown horrors. And upgrades that give you harmful after effects.
Only thing's missing is Vodka and Cheeki-Breeki.
Every time Mandalore gets posted I suggest his E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy Review.
After this review I was intrigued, so I picked it up. So far it's amazing, I can't wait to put more time into it.
While I haven't beaten it due to the backlog epidemic... I loved what I played. It's a little clunky, and I kinda wish the death system, on normal, was a little more punishing but it's got amazing atmosphere, tough enemies and a big emphasis on survival. Plus it has a fantastic vision system along with a tower defense like mode at night with a nice reward for doing it right. And it's only $15.
This is the first review I've seen of this game where it seems like the reviewer actually finished the game haha. It sounds really cool. I played a bit on steam and the atmosphere is GREAT. But the gameplay at least at first involves a whole lot of inventory management and crafting, and there was just a bit too much tedious stuff going on for me to want to keep playing so I returned it after an hour :\ . It didn't help that it came out in such a crowded year, it feels like this game got totally buried when it came out but this review has really shown me that there's more to the game than I thought.
Hopefully there will be a time where I'm more in the mood for that type of gameplay, because the craft that went into this game looks insane (I know the devs worked on it FOREVER, i remember seeing a trailer for it back in like 2013) and it sucks to see it get completely unnoticed by most people.
Happy to see Darkwood getting more attention. It's an excellent game. First genuine 10/10 game I've played in a long time - anything I can find at fault in the game really feels like a nit and not an authentic flaw.
It's important to note that the game is deliberately slow paced and a bit clunky. Inventory management is a core gameplay element, and while combat is responsive, it's also slow and heavily punishes mistakes.
What do people love so much about Mandalore's review style? I always see huge general praise whenever he's posted, but nothing specific in particular, and he instantly became popular despite only covering seemingly obscure (or at least niche) titles.
I want to learn more about what (in general opinion) separates a good critic from the thousands of others out there.